"Imagine having photos of John John Florence doing 10 ft airs with the Pyzel logo clearly visible, and you choose to use an AI ad."
The surfboard shaper Jon Pyzel, often described as “diabolically sexy” and most famous for his Mayzel collab surfboard with Matt Biolos along with some success with John John Florence, is under fire tonight after an advertisement for his eponymous label appeared online, with sleuths claiming it is AI-generated.
On Reddit, under the heading Pyzel AI ads, an image appears of a man holding a Pyzel surfboard, the advertisement sponsored by Pyzel and with a hot link to the site.
Can you see what the AI giveaway is?
Did you guess the Futures fin boxes glassed into the deck and the leash plug glassed onto the bottom?
A pile-on ensues.
So dumb. Like they didn’t have real photos of surfers holding their board on the beach so they had to AI generate this slop? How does this save them money they could have just given their AI a stock photo and told it to create a meta ad.
the fingers on that hand holding the board are probably a nightmare if you zoom in even a little. biggest surf brand on earth and they can’t just text some local to snap a pic with their phone
Imagine having photos of John John Florence doing 10 ft airs with the pyzel logo clearly visible, and you choose to use an ai ad.
If JJF is getting replaced by AI, what hope do the rest of us have?
I’ve enjoyed my Pyzel boards, but you can tell they have jumped the proverbial shark a bit when it comes to being an overinflated brand. Too many models. Overpriced. Everyone has to be riding them to be considered “Core”. etc.
They’ve definitely morphed into Channel Islands 2.0.
This is the dumbest shit I have ever seen. Fuckin lazy marketing team.
The truth, as always, is always a little greyer than what it first seems.
As one tech-savvy Redditor writes,
This is Google Ads automated assets BS. All the ad platforms now have these auto-generated slop assets, and most of them are enabled by default and unless you are very familiar with the ad platforms, it’s actually difficult to make sure all AI auto-generated text/images/video is turned off.
Google is incentivized to spend more on ad clicks, so they will create lots of automated assets to try lots of variations of ads to get clicks. They don’t care is it’s AI slop or not, they just care if it gets clicks and gets to take your ad spend.
If Pyzel is running their own ad account, they likely never saw these assets and had no idea they were created.
As someone who works at an agency that runs a lot of paid ads, this kind of crap happens all the time and google will gladly waste your ad spend serving these ads without you even knowing. It’s nearly impossible to track this down and find it, because Google doesn’t make it easy to see the auto-generated assets.
You can easily see all Google Ads Pyzel is running, and this isn’t one of them:
https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR14294203820299780097?region=US&preset-date=Last+7+days
Much later in the thread Jon Pyzel himself appears, a humble prophet before the people who were once his disciples.
To everyone here freaking out and believing that we sold out and have run out of photos to use for advertising – would you like to buy an amazing tropical island with a perfect left on one side and a perfect right on the other side? For only $20K?? Please hit me up directly for the deal of a lifetime and you can transfer the money to our secret offshore crypto account!! Jeez, give me a break!! You guys think we are some big corporation? I’m sitting here on my own trying to figure out how the hell that shit got where ever it was you found it. Carry on- Jon P
Shortly thereafter, a new advertisment appeared.
Question, are we at end times, as many claim, or is there a new tech dawn that will make our lives easier and more fulfilled than ever before?
I think latter although optimism has been my downfall in the past.